The process of developing and manufacturing products requires cooperation between multiple functional groups in separate corporate enterprises. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) must cooperate with suppliers, vendors, contract engineers, and distributors to deliver products to market on time and on budget. Collaboration is the interaction between multiple parties to achieve a common goal through a cooperative effort. Collaboration between OEM and suppliers, vendors, contract engineers, and distributors to deliver products involves sharing common goal oriented information such as engineering design documents, procurement documents, project management schedules, and production schedules. Collaboration enables a corporate enterprise to manage product design, sourcing, and manufacturing.
Today, collaboration is more challenging due to globally distributed corporate engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing operations for one or more buying and supplying companies. The global distribution of engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing resources makes it more difficult to collaboratively share information in a timely, efficient, and controlled manner. The advent of the Internet has enabled corporate enterprises to communicate using computers. The affiliation and/or collaboration of multiple resources in separate corporate enterprises forms an extended enterprise. Conventional collaboration software applications focus on individual functions like design engineering. The software generally does not link multi-discipline resources throughout the extended enterprise to enable collaboration on a project. This shortcoming has forced the resources to revert to conventional forms of communication. It is difficult to collaborate on a project using conventional telephone, fax, and/or electronic mail (e-mail) without the benefit of a collaboration tool that integrates multiple functional resources working toward a common goal.